Beliefs About People: The Operating System Behind Mass Influence
You’ve got someone in your downline who stopped returning calls two weeks ago. You’ve got a prospect who told you flatly there’s no chance they’d ever do something like this. And somewhere along the way you quietly decided both of them just aren’t your kind of person and went looking for someone more promising instead.
That’s the normal move in this business, and it’s the wrong one. Dave Wood built this lesson inside the Mass Influence Formula around a specific set of beliefs about people, not tactics or scripts, the actual operating assumptions running underneath everything else in the training. Change what you believe about the person in front of you and the tactics start working differently, sometimes dramatically so, before you’ve changed a single word you say.
As someone who’s tried to lead a team or work a list of prospects, you already know the quiet judgment that creeps in: not serious, too difficult, just not the type. Dave runs his entire business on a different set of assumptions, and he’s specific about why each one earns its place.
Why does believing you’re better than the people you’re leading sabotage you before you say a word?
The first belief Dave operates from, borrowed originally from something he heard the Dalai Lama say and decided to adopt outright: he isn’t better or worse than anyone he deals with. As Dave Wood puts it in the Mass Influence Formula, “I’m not better or worse than any other human being in the world, right?” Not the person who cleans his house. Not the newest rep who joined his team yesterday. As he puts it, “A new producer is just as important as an old producer.”
Here’s why that matters. The moment you privately believe you’re above the people you’re leading, two things happen automatically, whether you mean for them to or not. As Dave Wood puts it, “When you think you’re better than people, they feel it.” And the second thing is worse: you start trying to control them, and nobody responds well to being controlled, not your kids, not your spouse, not your downline, not your upline. Tell a person they can’t do something and you’ve handed them a reason to want to do exactly that.
Dave says this shows up in how his own employees treat him: no arrogance in the room, because he isn’t carrying any. It shows up too in how he handles people quitting his organization, which happens constantly in any team large enough to matter. People leave and come back all the time, because he isn’t holding them there by force or guilt. He’ll call, needle them a little, tell them he still cares, and more often than people expect, they come back and start building again. The belief isn’t a nicety. It’s the reason the door stays open long enough for people to walk back through it.
What if the person who’s furious with you is just working with bad resources, not a bad character?
The second belief runs even deeper: people always do the best they can with the resources they have available. As Dave Wood puts it, “people always do the best they can with the resources they have available.” He’s careful to note this isn’t a claim that people never do harmful things. It’s a claim about where those behaviors usually come from, and his own life is the example he reaches for.
He tells a story from Hawaii, back when he was homeless and living out of a van, tapping into whatever unsecured wifi he could find while he looked for a business to start. One house on the North Shore had fast internet, and he kept parking outside it until the Hawaiian man who lived there, having seen Dave’s van for the eighteenth time, had enough, walked over, knocked on the window, and told him flatly to get out of the car. He had every reason to be furious, and by Dave’s own account, he looked like he could do real damage.
Dave didn’t argue and didn’t apologize either. He told the man he genuinely appreciated him for never locking the connection down, that he was grateful for it. Something in the man’s posture shifted. As Dave Wood puts it, he told the man, “It’s because of people like you that the world’s a great place to live in.” The man told him he could keep using it, just not to park there overnight, and walked off.
Nothing about that man’s anger was really about Dave. It was a stranger repeatedly using his resource without asking, met at the door with gratitude instead of an excuse. Most people meet anger with defensiveness. Dave met it by assuming a decent reason sat underneath the reaction and speaking to that instead, which is exactly what the belief is built to produce.
A handful of the other operating beliefs Dave runs on show up constantly through the rest of this training:
- Nobody is permanently broken, they just haven’t been taught the right things yet or been told anyone believes in them.
- People have every resource they need inside them right now to get what they want; your job is connecting them to it, not lecturing them into it.
- There’s no such thing as failure, only feedback, the difference between telling yourself “I’m not rich” and “I’m not rich yet.”
- Every action anyone takes, even a bad one, is driven by an unconscious intention to keep themselves safe or feel okay.
Where do phobias, objections, and stuck patterns actually come from, and how fast can they change?
That last belief, the idea that every behavior carries a positive intention, is worth slowing down on, because Dave has a story that shows exactly how it works. As Dave Wood puts it, “Every action that somebody is taking has an unconscious, positive intention behind it.” Even something that looks completely irrational from the outside.
He tells the story of a woman he met at a seminar in Hawaii who’d needed medication just to survive the flight there, she was that terrified of airplanes. She found Dave and told him how scared she was. He had her close her eyes, imagine herself on the plane, feel the panic fully, then imagine floating thirty feet outside her own body and watching herself from out there. Within minutes it surfaced that her fear had nothing to do with airplanes. Years earlier she’d been in a bad car accident, and the exact way she’d been breathing and holding her body in that moment had gotten stapled to a fear response that later generalized to every form of travel, cars and planes both, despite the memory never involving a plane.
Ten minutes of conversation was enough to unhook it, after years of therapy hadn’t. As Dave Wood puts it, quoting the message she sent him afterward, “I don’t know how the hell you did that, but I got on the airplane, and it was like I was sitting down in my father’s arms, holding me in the rocking chair as a little girl.”
I don’t know how the hell you did that, but I got on the airplane, and it was like I was sitting down in my father’s arms, holding me in the rocking chair as a little girl.
Why does this matter for a downline or a room full of prospects instead of a therapy client? Because the primary job of the unconscious mind is keeping you alive, and it will manufacture strange behavior in service of that job. The objection somebody gives you at a kitchen table, the reason they say they’ll never do this business, the reluctance that looks like stubbornness, all of it runs on the same wiring as that woman’s fear of flying. Find the safety the behavior is protecting, and you can usually work with it. Argue with the behavior itself, and you’re arguing with the wrong thing.
Why does being right about everything cost you more than it ever earns you?
The last belief ties everything else together, and Dave states it almost exactly the way you’d hear it from an old teacher. As Dave Wood puts it, “The map is not there. It’s not the territory. The menu is not the meal.” Whatever you believe about the world is not the world. It’s a filtered, distorted, incomplete version of it, built out of your own history, and everyone in the room is running a different version at the same time.
Once you actually accept that you’re not right about most things, holding your position stops being worth the cost. Dave tells a story from 2010, on a three-way call where a prospect kept talking over him and cutting him off no matter how patiently Dave tried to answer. After the third interruption, Dave dropped the polite version of himself entirely, warned the man flatly that they were about to have a problem, and when the man cut him off again anyway, Dave told him exactly what he thought of it and laid out blunt terms: answer one question, get in now, or never speak to Dave again. As Dave Wood puts it, “I am making more a month than you make in a year.” He hung up expecting nothing. Minutes later, a commission notification came through. The man had raced to his email and gotten his card in before the offer was gone.
As Dave Wood puts it, “Whoever has the most flexibility in the action they take and the way they communicate is going to control the communication.” His brother, who works as a therapist, once told him something that stuck: therapists constantly project their beliefs about their clients onto their clients, and teachers do the same to their students. You can’t avoid it, because you can’t stop communicating what you actually believe, even in silence. The only real choice is which belief you project, that people are limited and difficult, or that they’re capable and simply running a different map than yours.
The full lesson goes considerably further than what’s above: how language shapes a listener’s unconscious responses in real time, how to actually notice responsiveness happening in a room while you’re speaking, and how Dave ties all of these beliefs back into the presentation and team-building framework from earlier trainings. The entire course, including this lesson and everything built on top of it, is available for $99 through the Mass Influence Formula course.
Get the course, pick the one person you already wrote off, and go find out what resources they were actually working with.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
So let's talk for a minute about things that are useful to believe, things that are useful to think about whenever you're doing anything when you're dealing with groups, right? Now these things aren't perfect ideas, they're just ideas, alright? And they don't necessarily apply to every situation, but they do work, right? They do work. And it works really, really, really, really well to think about people like this, okay?
And there's a lot of reasons why and I'm going to talk about why kind of for each one of these reasons. Number one thing that I think is really useful, actually I'm not going to write these down, I'm just going to talk about them, right? Number one thing that I think is really useful is that you are not better or worse than another human being, okay? You're not better and you're not worse, right? Now that might not be true, maybe you are better than me, for example, you know?
But for me, I don't think you're better than me and I don't think you're worse than me. I don't see us really as that different. I think we might know different things, I don't really see us as different. Too many people, they think they're better than other people, right? And what's the problem with that?
When you think you're better than people, they feel it. Number one. Number two, when you think you're better than people, you usually try to control them. People do not respond well to being controlled. Kids don't respond well.
Parents don't respond well. Downline don't respond well. Upline don't respond well. Your wife doesn't respond well ever and neither do your husbands. People don't respond, okay, well to being controlled.
If I say you can't do that, it produces an automatic response of you wanting to do it instantly. I'm going to put you in this garden and you can eat everything here except for that. Everything but that. Don't eat that one. It's evil, right?
Great metaphor, isn't it? You know? People don't respond well to control and if you think you're better than them, you'll try to control them. You're going to try to control their behavior, you're going to try to control what they do. And also though, people will feel it if you think you're better than them.
But I like to look at it like this. I actually got this, I believe the first time I heard this was from the Dalai Lama and I just thought that it was a brilliant idea. It was a brilliant philosophy and I just decided to adopt it, right? He says I'm not better or worse than any other human being in the world, right? And here's the thing with that, is it puts you in an equal playing field where you have the ability to do anything somebody else has the ability to do.
It makes sense? Also makes people feel good around you and helps you gain responsiveness with them. Because like, for example, with my employees, yes, any of them, when I'm around them, there's no arrogance that comes across like I'm better or more important than them ever. And all of them feel like that, right? When I'm around my employees, they feel equal to me.
You want to know why? Because I see them as equals. To me it doesn't matter that I own the company, right? The rep that just joined in my book is as important as me, right? A new producer is just as important as an old producer.
An old producer is simultaneously just as important as a new producer. I see people as having equal importance. I see people as having equal importance. I see people as having equal importance in the world. Because even if, you know, like in my house, I need maids and stuff.
I need them because my house is too big to clean without maids. I can't do it, right? And nor would I do it. In fact, I wouldn't even clean if it was small because I've never cleaned anything, right? I used to have a messy house until I had maids, right?
But in any case, I would never do it. If nobody cleans my office, papers literally will just continue to stack up on my desk until somebody goes crazy and cleans it and it's never me. I just leave them there and ignore them, right? Therefore, I like being in a clean environment. I need my maid, right?
I don't think I'm better than my maid. That make sense to you guys? When you think like that about people, they just feel good around you. They feel good, you know? Like people, for example, in Power, I have people like quit all the time.
Why? Because if you have a big organization, people quit all the time. The amount of people that you need to replace. When you have a big organization to keep it growing, it's pretty astonishing, actually, if you've never been told about it, right? But in my organization, people quit all the time and they come back all the time.
Why? Because they leave and it doesn't bother me at all. I'm not trying to control them. I might make fun of them a little, you know what I mean? I might call them up on the phone and I say, you know, that's fucking stupid, you know?
But I just had a guy as an example. These guys have sworn publicly. They would never promote with us again, ever. And I just, you know, had a conversation, called for a bit, you know, told them I loved them and, you know, had a conversation and you come back and start slamming in Power again because when I get around them, there's just no better and worse. So I think that's a really useful thing to believe because it helps you gain rapport with people and it helps you come from a place of good intentions, right?
Here's the second thing. I don't believe anybody's broken, right? At least not permanently. I think people work. They work the way that they're supposed to unless they've got some sort of serious psychological disorder, right?
And some people, to be fair, they've got a serious psychological disorder, right? They're missing part of their brain or something like that. But even most of them can do what they want to do in life. But what that helps you realize when you think that people work the way they're supposed to is that if they're not doing what they want to do in life. Because they haven't been taught the right things, right?
And this along with the next principle helps imply forgiveness, right? It just helps imply it. Because if people work the way they're supposed to, maybe the only problem is they've never had anybody say, I believe in you. Because I've had that. If I go back in time, I had great parents.
They believed in me. They taught me. They taught us well. They did their best. I had great sponsors in early network marketing who weren't the best sponsors and they weren't the best producers.
But man, these guys had a lot of heart, you know what I mean? I used to call my sponsor every day and my sponsor, I'd get on the phone, I was so frustrated and he'd say, you know what, Dave, you might be frustrated, but I believe you can do it. Keep fighting. You know what I mean? And maybe the problem somebody has is they've never had anybody believe in them and they've never had anybody.
They believe they can do it, right? But also, if you believe people work perfectly, and this is going to feed into a lot of other things I'm going to talk about, you won't judge them from joining things and getting in things and try to filter them because of who you think they are. Because they're not who you think they are anyways. What you're seeing and what you think about people is only a model of who they are. It's not who they are, right?
Like a lot of people, they aren't good recruiters. And the only reason why they're not is because they filter people out because they're thinking about how broke they were when they started. How many of you were broke when you started something? Right? Yeah.
So a lot of times what you do is you say, well, this person shouldn't join because they have no money like I had no money. Not realizing you just joined anyways. How many people in here were broke but you just did it anyways? This is a useful belief to have about people. It's a useful way of thinking is people work the way they're supposed to.
Here's the next thing, and this actually feeds from the previous one, is people always do the best they can with the resources they have available. They always do the best they can with the resources they have available. Now, this may or may not be true. I think actually sometimes people do malicious things. But I also kind of believe with most people when they do malicious things that they're doing it under a set of really bad resources, right?
And what do I mean by bad resources, you know? You guys never know what somebody's been through, and this is feeding into what I think about people and why people kind of like being around me, right, is, you know, most of the people that I've met that are, like, really whacked. Out or malicious or something like that, were, like, abused and beaten up as kids, you know, or they kind of have had life bite them and they made a series of decisions and they're just a certain way. And the reason why I believe that those people even are tending to do their best is because I've seen them change so many times by just being loved, right, that I tend to think anyone can just change. Right?
I have seen some real weird stuff happen, right? Real weird stuff happen from just loving on people. I was a missionary back in 2000, I think 2000 to 2002. I remember this one time this guy was just, like, he had this just real, like, dark, dark, dark energy. You know what I'm talking about?
It's like they walk in the room and they're, like, Eeyore, you know what I mean? But they're, like, Eeyore's negative friend, you know? It was like they walk in and you just kind of, like, feel slimy just being around them or whatever. So, you know, I go in this place and this guy just has this really, really, really dark energy. And I've kind of always been like this.
I don't know why. Maybe it's my parents, maybe it's just who I am. And this guy just kept interrupting and he was, like, just overtly and overly cussing, like every other word, and just being, like, just nasty. You know what I mean? And you know what I actually did, and I've always responded weird like this, is I put my hand on his shoulder, I said, stop it, and he just kind of, like, went like this.
And I said, dude, I love you, right? That guy just, like, broke into tears and all that bullshit went away in a second, right? One time, one time, this guy wanted to kick my ass, right? Now, when somebody wants to kick my ass, it's actually scary. Because I'm large enough to where most of the time they won't want to unless they're really large or really mean or on some kind of crazy drugs or something.
People just don't tend to want to fight bigger people, right? They just don't, right? People tend to pick on small people, right? So in any case, I'm homeless and I'm living in a van and I'm tapping into people's internet and stuff, right? You know, because it's like, hey, you don't have a password on that.
I'm just going to tap into it. I'm just going to use it, right? And you know, I'm doing this in Hawaii. Which, you know. And I'm white, which is a disadvantage, right?
So I go down there and I'm in this van and I keep going back to this one house because this dude had really, really fast internet, right? And I was looking for a business to start, right? With this guy. So in any case, I'm parked outside this dude's house and he's seen me for like the 18th time. This is up by, this is up on the North Shore and this dude comes out of his house, I mean, just strong.
He's a big Hawaiian, mean looking guy. Like he looked like he wanted to kill me and he walks over like this, you know what I mean? Like to my van, right? And then he knocks on the window like this and he just, I mean, that guy could rip my arms off probably. Especially then, I was real skinny then, right?
I was only eating raw food and stuff and like, you know, it wasn't working out that much and I was just kind of skinny and this guy looked mean. Plus in Hawaii, a lot of people can actually fight, right? In any case. But I never really imagined that. Right?
I'm worried about anything. So I open the door and this guy goes, this guy goes, dude, you have been plucking, you have been plugging into my internet for weeks. Get out of the car, right? And he just looked mad and he, you know, you could just kind of tell he's like, you know, maybe his wife yelled at him and he wanted to fight somebody that day, right? And you know what I did?
You know, he said, you've been using my internet and get out of the car right now. And I said, you know what, I really appreciate you not putting a password on that because I'm really thankful for, for, for you and for letting me use it. I just want to let you know. And I just so nice, he couldn't say enough. Right?
And he, this is what he goes. You could tell there's like this internal conflict, you know, like I want to kick this guy's ass, but I can't do it. If that guy's that nice, like I can't, you know, so he goes, he goes, and I goes, you know what? It's because of people like you that the world's a great place to live in. And he goes, he goes, all right, just, just don't stay here at night.
You can use it. And then you walked off, right? Yeah. You appeal to the higher intentions. You know what I'm saying?
Right? So in any case, in any case, people do the best they can with the resources they got available. Sometimes you just need to give them different resources or teach him something new. All right. and, and everything can change when you do that, right?
Here's the next one to believe about people, especially right. And these are just things. Once again, I like to believe them. And why do I like to believe them? Because when I believe them about people, I get really astonishing results with people all the time, right?
And here's the next one is that people have all the resources they need at any moment to achieve any outcome they desire. I believe that, right? I believe actually everybody in this room, I believe you have all of the resources that you need inside right now, especially after being here this weekend. Especially after today, I believe you have every resource you need inside of you to achieve anything you want to achieve, right? And if that's true, then all you need to do to help people succeed is not really even teach them anything.
You need to help them connect to those resources, which is actually a lot easier most of the time, right? It's a lot easier. I had a guy named Kyle Garrett come out and he's the one that did that video that we launched the other day. And, you know, he came up with this. He came out to Costa Rica and we were talking because I get along pretty much with everybody, but I was talking to him and he just really likes being around and work with us.
I actually don't know if he's in the room, but anyway, so Kyle's out and, and he says, you know what, dude, he says, I know people that like, that like see you and nobody understands. Nobody gets what you, what you do and how you do it. It doesn't make sense to literally, it makes sense to nobody. He says, and I said, what have you, you know, what have people told you? And he said, well, I've had like five people.
Yeah. He'd be like, you know, cause we've talked and like it comes up that I know you and he says, I've had like five people tell me things like this, like how the hell is Dave Wood? It looks like he's just like walking around believing in people and they're like making all this money and all these people are making this money. What the hell is he doing? It doesn't make sense to almost anybody, right?
Because most of what I do is directed at not a strategy or a concept like a normal person does. It's directed at helping the people who are around me. People who are around me get in touch with the resources you already have inside, right? Because if you believe people can do anything, it puts you in a different place of power with them when they run into problems, right? I believe people can do anything, but I believe I could do anything too because I don't believe I'm better or worse than another human being ever, right?
Not ever. Doesn't matter who they are. Doesn't matter what they do for a living. Doesn't matter. I might make fun of their job or something.
I might make fun of them, but I make fun of me at least as much as I make fun of them. I look funnier most of the time. That's an easy one. And if they actually look funnier, I get confused for a second and then I say, well, they dress better or something like that, which actually I'm wearing normal clothes right now. Priscilla's doing this to me, but in any case, you have all the resources you need inside you.
You have all the resources you need to achieve anything that you want to achieve, and so do the people around you. These are useful things to believe. It also puts you out of a place of manipulation thinking like this, doesn't it? Right? Here's another really, really, really, really useful one.
Is the meaning of what you're communicating is not the words you say, it's the result it produces, which almost always is different. The meaning of your communication, the meaning of what you say is specifically the unconscious internal maps that it produces, right? And this goes into how language is built into the brain. Language is actually something really interesting. We just learn to talk, but language is probably the most complex thing the human brain does, and it's actually built into the brain, right?
There's a lot of really interesting studies on identical twins. A lot of times, if you have identical twins, they will develop an entire communication system with body language before they learn to speak that represents the entire framework of language. Yeah. And they'll talk to each other with their bodies and the way they blink and their foreheads and stuff, and it's as complex as kind of a simple form of language. Has words like because, it has explanations for things, all sorts.
Because language is built into a deep structure in the human brain. We have an internal map and an internal way of representing things, right, that is hardwired into our brain. And then as we're learning our first language, if we speak more than one, or as we're learning language as we're kids, right, we are attaching that hardwired structure of language to things that we see, things we experience, things that we feel, and the way people are describing things. But all of us have different internal representations to describe the same things. When all of you think of the word chair, you all think of a different chair, right?
And any time you say a word, it results in a series of internal maps and representations that are literally different for everyone. See, sometimes what the problem is, is we're describing something and people don't get it. It's like, you don't get me. Well, that's probably your problem most of the time. If people don't get you, maybe you're not communicating with them in a way that they understand.
Or maybe you're not allowing them to come to the conclusion of the meaning, you're trying to force your meaning onto them, and they have no capacity to understand it the way you do, because they understand words differently. I mean, even in the English language, which is really interesting, people don't even know what things mean that some people say. We just use words, and we've never looked up the meaning or anything, and everybody has a different meaning. But an interesting thing is everybody also believes different things. In this room, for example, there's somebody in here who believes that it's hard work to make money, right?
There's other people in here that don't believe that hard work has anything to do with making money at all. They're a disconnected phenomenon, right? There are people in here who could be in the same world as somebody right next to you, your whole world is difficult, and you're always saying things like, why is life so hard, right? And there's other people that are sitting right next to you that don't experience this difficulty all the time. They think life is magical, fun, and easy, right?
That make sense? All those things are just perception. They're all just perception, right? So you understand when you're communicating that the meaning of your communication is the response it creates in people. Here's the next thing.
Even if you want to, you can't not communicate, okay? Maybe I'd need to repeat that one, so I'll just repeat it. Even if you want to, you can't not communicate. You can't. You can't stop yourself from communicating, even if you're mad.
Right? So you're mad. Ladies, you're mad at your husband. I'm not saying anything. Well, you just said everything, actually.
Are you mad? No, right? You can't not communicate, right? You have to communicate, and you're going to communicate to even survive and do things. So why not learn to control it?
You know what I mean? Like a lot of people, they don't understand that they can have total authority and control over the way that they communicate, because you can learn these things, right? In fact, I'm going to teach you the framework of it today, and over the last couple of seminars, I've actually taught you a lot of the framework, too. But today, I'm going to teach you a framework that'll actually take you a little while to get good at, right? But even though it'll take you a little while to get good at it, you're not going to be little while to get good at, after today you're going to start doing more of it unconsciously and automatically just by the act of hearing it, right?
And if you want to know a real secret for that, it's if you want to really, really become a powerful communicator, become a powerful influencer, how do you really do it? Get around people that can do weird stuff, okay? Because if you do that, that's one of the powers of coming to events and seminars and going through products like this one, buying products and watching people that produce extraordinary outcomes. I'm not saying that to sell my products, because I do the same thing, you know what I mean? I constantly seek out people that can do weird stuff, and by weird stuff, I mean stuff that appears to have a level of magic to it.
Because I could talk to two people who are in sales, and one of them closes like nine in ten, and another one doesn't close nearly anybody, right? And just being around that difference rubs off on you. There's this thing in your body and mind called mirroring neurons, right? And what they do is they create unconscious copying responses, essentially, right? When you get around your friends and they start talking in a certain way, you start talking in the same way just by being around them, right?
Just by being around them, right? Anybody in here, you know, you've been married for a while or something, and you start saying similar things to what your spouse says after a while, you know? You start doing your hair a little bit differently, or whatever it is, you know? They make you dress nice, or whatever, you know? You know, but the thing is, is even when you're around your friends, if they have a mannerism, they do something weird with their hands, you'll just start doing it, right?
You'll just start doing it, right? Like, I've had friends and they just do stuff with their hands, and then I just start moving my hand like that, right? But actually, if you do a sport, and you watch that sport on TV, like you do martial arts, and you do martial arts, and you do martial arts, and you watch videos of people doing martial arts, too, it will actually make you better at martial arts automatically. Because watching it fires off the same neurons in your body as completing the movements. Obviously, you can't just, like, watch videos and be Bruce Lee or something.
You've got to practice. You just get better by watching it. You can't not communicate, and because you have to communicate, you might as well learn how to do it good. Here's the next one, really useful, okay? Really useful.
Every action that somebody is taking has an unconscious, positive intention behind it. Everything they do. Everything they do. Even if what they're doing is negative, right? Even if what they're doing is negative.
And we could discover what somebody's intentions are by something called chunking, right? Really easy to do. But basically, it kind of looks like this. Let's say somebody's doing something like... Let's say they're, like, scared of elevators or something, right?
That's stupid, right? To somebody who's not scared of elevators. But there's people who have real phobias of elevators. They can't walk into an elevator because they walk in and get a panic attack. There's people that can't get in an airplane without having some sort of disastrous emotional response.
They can't do it, right? Here's an interesting story for you. I was in Hawaii at a seminar with Vic, actually. And you remember that in Hawaii, right? And so, there's this lady.
She flies out to Hawaii, right? And somehow, she managed to get the courage to fly out there, I think through medication, okay? But she gets out to Hawaii, and she knows that I know all this weird stuff. So she comes up. She's like, I am so terrified of airplanes, right?
I'm so scared, right? So the first thing I did actually was made fun of her, but I did it actually for a reason. And I said, here, I'm going to do a little exercise with you. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to close your eyes, and imagine you're on an airplane, and imagine those terrible feelings that you feel.
And now, imagine yourself snapping out of your body, floating 30 feet outside of you, and just look at yourself, and look how fucking stupid this is. You're scared of airplanes, right? Now, she just goes, hey! And she's a little mad, and I was like, I'm just kidding, right? And then I did.
But I walked her through this process. And what happened is, a few years before, actually, and this is really common with people, she'd had this really dramatic experience where she had gotten in a really bad accident, right? And it wasn't on an airplane, and it wasn't seeing something related to airplanes. But the way she was breathing and holding her body, right, at the time when she had this really bad drama happen, for whatever reason, one day she was in a car. Once again, not an airplane.
A couple years ago. A couple years later. And she was just, like, holding her body in the same way, and remembered that memory. And she developed a simultaneous phobia of all automatic travel. So after that, and it was just this weird thing that happened, she couldn't get in a car, and couldn't get in an airplane.
Now, I talked to her and got rid of that in, like, 15 minutes. And she'd been to years of therapy for it. And I'm not a therapist, right? I just know weird stuff. But in any case, I was talking to this lady.
And... And this is what happened, right? In a 10-minute conversation, I moved this lady from... She would get in an airplane and go into a panic attack, to where she got in the airplane to fly home, and all she could think about was how much her father loved her when she was a little girl. 10-minute conversation, right?
And she sent me a message on Facebook. She says, I don't know how the hell you did that, but I got on the airplane, and it was like I was sitting down in my father's arms, holding me in the rocking chair as a little girl. Right? But why... What was this lady's reason for that?
Now, that's a stupid fear, isn't it? Like, it's really dumb. It's like, let's be scared of getting in an airplane. They're safer than cars. Probably safer than walking around on the street.
You know what I mean? Or let's be scared of an elevator, right? How many times does an elevator just drop 50 floors? And kill everybody in it? You know what I'm saying?
I mean, this is more rare than being hit by a meteor. You know? Let's be real. Right? But people are scared of things.
But why are they scared? Because the primary purpose of all the things your unconscious mind does is to keep you physically alive. Right? And it does that in all sorts of different ways. But that survival mechanism will sometimes do negative stuff if it thinks that doing that stuff is going to keep you safe.
So, safety is the positive intention. A really long way of saying that. Every behavior has an unconscious positive intention. And you can change almost any behavior by finding that positive intention and then reframing the actions that you're creating from it. Like, there's a lot more ways to keep yourself safe than being scared of airplanes.
A lot better ways. There's a lot better ways. There's a lot better ways, right, of feeling good about yourself than belittling other people. Right? There's a lot better ways to feel confident than bullying.
That make sense? There's a lot better ways of recruiting than being negative about other companies and stuff. Right? There's always a better way to do everything you're trying to do. Does that make sense to everybody in here?
Right? So, every action has a positive intention. And here's another one that's really important. Okay? Is there's no failure.
Right? We should actually just not have the word failure, I don't think. Because I think that it creates this wrong impression. Society fails you if you don't get answers right on a test. Right?
You fail. You know what I mean? You don't, like, need to learn something better on the test for next time. You fail it. Right?
Sometimes people say you either succeed or you fail. Right? The problem with that is, is that in order to succeed, most of the time, you need to do a lot of stuff that doesn't work first. Right? And if you just think about it, like, this isn't working yet, because I'm not doing it right yet.
Because I need to learn something. What can I learn from this experience? You didn't actually just fail. Right? You didn't actually just fail.
You just learned something. See, if you could take every experience you have, and you could get some kind of a feedback from it, and you could just adjust something, then all of a sudden, it's not failure. It's like Benjamin Franklin. You're just trying to make a light bulb in a different way until it works the way that you want. It doesn't matter if you take 5,000 more tries to make it work the way you want.
It's just not working the way that you want yet. Right? Right? There's a big difference between saying, I'm not rich and I'm not rich yet. Yet presupposes that you will be rich at one time in the future.
Right? Does that make sense to everybody in here? So don't look at anything you do as negative or failing. Just look at it as feedback. And sometimes you can actually think that it's funny.
I actually started thinking it was funny after a while when people just didn't decide to join. Right? And I actually thought it was hilarious after a long time because I started making so much money. And some of these people that wouldn't join, there's only a few of them that I ever talked to. You know, but I'd look at the emails and the stuff and the people's things they send me.
And it doesn't matter what you're marketing. If you're building on the internet, especially you're sending emails out, how is somebody, they email you something and they're like, you know, this is a scam. Right? You know? Well, it'd be like, yeah, I've got this great deal.
The Lord just appeared to me the other day and told me if you just send me money, he's going to multiply it. You know what I mean? Like, no, seriously, people think all this dumb stuff so they email you stuff. And I actually just think it's funny. Right?
I see actually, Michelangelo, your responses to people are so funny. Right? No, the people, they email them. You know what I mean? And somebody emailed them and they said, is your business New Age?
Right? So I emailed them back and he said, no, it's led by Satan. There's a difference. Right? You know what I mean?
So like, if you think this stuff's funny, you respond differently. Right? Like people, I used to actually like overcome objections and have words that I'd use and formulas and like structures of sentences to overcome objections. But then I just started laughing at people when they gave them to me and then pausing awkwardly. And then they'd feel weird and then they'd say, why'd you do that?
And I said, are you really going to be so stupid? Just join. And you don't think that'd work, but it just works better about anything you could do because I'm just basically putting out an energy that, hey, you just need to get in this thing. Right? And I stopped answering questions at all.
Right? So a lot of times we just need to relax and realize that these things are just part of our experience. It's just ways of learning. Right? So there's no failure.
There's only feedback. Right? What's the next one? This one's important to what I'm getting into next, which is unconscious phenomenon. Body and mind are connected.
You can tell what's going on in somebody's mind by what's happening with their body because you can't not, you can't not change the way your body moves and communicates when what's on the inside of your mind changes at the same time. Right? If you're feeling a certain way, it shows up in your face. It shows up in your eyes. It shows up in your body.
If you're responding, it shows up in your body. When you learn to speak in front of people and things like that, when you speak and you have rapport, the whole audience moves in waves at the same time. Right? Body and mind are connected. And also you can impact the mind by impacting the body and by changing the postures of the body.
The same is true in reverse. Right? You guys slunch over, you start feeling tired. Right? When you're tired, you start slunching over.
But also just slunching over will make you tired. Sitting up straight and breathing deeply will make you feel good. But when you feel good, you sit up and you breathe deeply. The body and mind are connected and they respond to each other. Right?
So you can affect people's behaviors and you can see it in their body and you can see it in the way they respond when you're communicating. And that is your feedback mechanism. Right? That's it. If you're speaking in front of a room, your feedback mechanism is the way people's bodies are responding to what you're saying.
And how do you pay attention to that? Peripheral vision. You just pay attention to everything at once. Right? Like this.
If you look up here at the stage and you look here at my hands, and you're just focused on it and not looking at everything else, if I just stare at this guy at the front of the room, right? I only see that thing. Right? When people get in fights and stuff, a lot of times they go into tunnel vision. And this is true especially with people that have never been hit or trained to fight.
Like a lot of times it's really common if somebody was attacked with a knife, they could literally describe the knife and tell you words that it said on it. Because their mind will slow it down. Right? And it'll... And it'll brighten out the perception on something really small.
But they won't be able to tell you whether the attacker was black, white, Chinese. They can't tell. They don't remember. Right? Because their mind was absorbed in the knife.
So one of the things boxers do and one of the things they teach you in good martial arts is to look at nothing, see everything. Right? To have a soft gaze and see everything at the same time. The samurai used to look at a point but then allow their eyes to open up in peripheral vision. And see everything at once.
Now, as an observation, isn't it interesting how when I described that you just went into peripheral vision? And how did I know you did that? Because I'm paying attention to your bodies. Right? About 90% of the room just went into peripheral vision just by describing it.
Right? Mind does that all the time. So in any case, in any case body and mind are connected and you can affect one with the other. Here's the next one. Super useful.
What's possible in the world is possible for me. Right? Everybody repeat after me actually. What's possible in the world is possible for me. Now this is true.
You don't have to keep repeating. This is true aside from like serious psychological or nervous system limitations. Right? Obviously I can't jump as high as Michael Jordan can. Right?
Number one, I'm white. Right? Which is a deficiency there. Right? And number two, number two, I haven't been playing basketball my whole life and I'm in my 30s now.
Right? But I can jump higher. Right? I can jump higher. Right?
And any behavior can be modeled to a certain degree even if it's outside your personality. You can model out almost anything and get better at it. Okay? What's possible in the world for another human being is possible for me. Right?
Even Jesus, one of my favorite quotes from Jesus is greater things than this shall you do if you believe in me. Right? Why do I think that's cool? Right? I mean Jesus said that stuff.
You'll actually go out and do bigger miracles than this. Right? Because what's possible for one person is possible for another. Right? I've met most, I've met a ton of people that are million-dollar-a-year earners in network marketing and none of them are really better than you.
None of them. They might work harder, they may have been doing it for longer, they may have adjusted their behavior more, but they're not better. Right? So, what's possible for one person is possible for another. Right?
I've met most people that are million-dollar-a-year earners in network marketing and none of them are really better than you. Right? They're just different. Make sense? Yeah.
Makes sense. Right? Makes sense. It's easy. Right?
So what's possible in the world is possible for me. Next one. Right? Whoever has the most flexibility in the action they take and the way they communicate is going to control the communication. Whoever has the most flexibility is going to control the communication.
Right? What do I mean by that? Too many people are rigid and unflexible in their thinking and in their behavior and in the way they communicate to people. They won't change it when it doesn't work. Now, if it's working, I'm all for not changing it.
Right? Or if you know it's going to work based on experience, I'm all for not changing it. But too many people, they try to communicate in a certain way and it's not working and they don't just change it. And whoever's more flexible, whoever's more flexible is going to control the outcomes of behavior and is going to control the outcomes of communication. I'm going to tell you a story to warn you in advance that there's a swear word in it.
So plug your ears if you're Mormon. I actually thought that was a little funny. I grew up Mormon, so I, you know, my dad would laugh if he was in the room or he would glare at me, one of the two. You know? Or he would laugh while glaring secretly.
Yeah, I think that's funny, Dave. Wait till we leave this meeting. So I'm on the phone, right? And this is back in 2010. And somebody schemed me into a three-way call.
And I was like, man, you know. And I've told this story before because I think it's so hilarious because it totally changed the way I perceive getting people to join, right? So I'm on the phone with this guy and he's just being an ass. You know what I mean? And I don't mean an ass like, you know, he's calling me names or something.
I mean, he just keeps asking me questions and interrupting me. And I try to answer the question because I try to be nice to everyone, right? And I'm answering the question. He just keeps cutting me off, right? And interrupting me, right?
So in any case, he does this like three times. He's like, you know, how's this comp plan work? And I say, well, you know, let me explain. And I start explaining, which was sort of dumb, but I was just like in this relaxed, lazy mood, right? And so I start explaining.
And then he cuts me off. He goes, well, what about this? Doesn't this, you know, this product, you know, who really wants to buy this? And so I go, well, we got this mark. And then he cuts me off again.
Now, the time I'm making like 30,000 bucks. And I'm like, well, I'm making like 30,000 dollars a month and living in Costa Rica, right? And like live this fantasy. So I say this. I say, here's the deal.
If you do that again, and I mean specifically cutting me off, we're going to have a problem. Do you want me to answer your questions or not? If you're going to ask something, I'll answer, do you want to hear it or not? Because I could go. And he says, no, no, no, I want to hear it.
And I said, okay, what's your question? I start answering the question. He cuts me off and I say, fuck you. Right? Now, I did that basically because I wanted to get off the phone.
And I was also trying to encourage my downline to not call me with their prospects at the same time, right? It was like, avoid this situation in the future, right? But here's what happened. The guy stopped and he goes, what did you just say? And I repeated myself.
I said, maybe you didn't hear me when I just told you to go fuck yourself. And I said, here's the deal. You got a pen and a piece of paper? And he goes, yep. I said, I want you to write down and take notes for the next minute.
Here's the deal. How much money are you making in a month? And he goes, well, I said, how much money are you making? Right? And I said, so here's the deal.
I am making more a month than you make in a year. Right? I'm nicer than you. My life is better. Right?
The girl I'm with is more beautiful. And I'm like this because I'm not an ass. So you have a choice to either join or I will never talk to you ever again in the rest of your life. I'm hanging up and if you don't get in, you can't ever join because I won't let you in the team. And I just hung up the phone.
Now I did that actually because I didn't want to talk to him anymore and I was a little bit irritated because I could never deal with these guys that just interrupt me all the time. You know what I mean? But a few minutes later I got a commission note and a notification. And this guy got off a call where I just swore at him. Right?
Ran to his email, pulled out his credit card and got in before like he wouldn't have the chance anymore. Right? Well that's flexibility in communication. I'm willing to try anything. You know what I mean?
I'm not ashamed of doing anything. I'll try anything because I just don't think I'm failing ever. I just think it's all interesting. I don't have any like sort of social walls and stuff like that. I'll do goofy stuff.
I'll try whatever and get something done and see if it works. And then if it not I'll try something else and I'll just keep doing that. And that's one of the reasons I can sell like I can sell. See because when I'm in a room in front of people this presentation is structured. You know what I mean?
Like I just went in order through all that stuff which is the pre-frames for what we're going to talk about next. We're going to take a break here in a second. Right? And I just went through all that in order and I could go back through it in order. Right?
But the point is when I'm talking I'm actually watching you. Right? And if you're not responding to the story until you're responding again and then I move to the next thing. Right? If you're not flexible if you're rigid all the time you can't get people to just respond.
Right? That make sense to everybody in here? Yes. All right. So.
Right? Last one and we talked about this a little bit earlier but the last one that I want to cover is this. Is that and this one's a really common one. The map is not there. It's not the territory.
The menu is not the meal. And what I mean by that is what you believe about the world is not the world around you. And what people believe about the world is not actually the world. What people think is right is not an actual representation of what's going on in the environment almost all the time. And the reason for that is that little drawing I made up there you know on the whiteboard.
Right? What do I mean? Well. If everybody in here believes different things and all of you do. I mean even all you get a bunch of Christians in the room and they all argue about the meaning of the same scriptures and stuff.
You know what I mean? So even people operating from the same rule books believe different things about the rule books. All of them. You know? So are all of them right?
Well I don't particularly going to argue about it. You know? What I'm pointing out is everybody believes different things. Right? But here's the key.
Is that you're not actually responding to the world when you're responding. You're responding to what's going on in your head which is a representation of the world. That's what you're responding to. Right? You're responding to your internal map that's sorting the perception of the world and it's altering it before you ever even see it.
And it's altering it unconsciously in certain ways. And because it's altering it unconsciously you're seeing things that aren't there you're not seeing things that are there. You're distorting what's right in front of you to make it out to fit inside your little world that you believe in. Right? You know?
I used to come up with the most unbelievable contortions to prove that I was right about stuff. You know? But here's the key. I still do. Right?
And so do you. Right? When you think you're right about something and you believe something your mind just deletes things that are right in front of you distorts them and changes them around to make them fit the way that you think. Right? Now, why is this useful?
And that's all I'm talking about today is things that are useful. The reason why it's useful is because if you don't think you're right about everything right? You can change your behavior to respond to the way that another person sees the world. Because when you're communicating with them you need to learn to communicate with their map of the world not yours. Right?
With the way they see the world. Right? The structure that's built into their brain is the same as the structure that's built into yours biologically. But the map they've built around it is different because they grew up in a different town had different parents maybe spoke a different language had different set of experiences but they've grown to see different things. Right?
Like I see this world of abundance. Right? Now here's a key between all this stuff that I just pointed out and then I'm going to go through it real fast but just repeat what they are so you guys can jot them down or whatever and then we're going to take a break. Right? Here's the key here's the real key to all of this stuff.
If you're not right about everything okay? And you're not right about most things truthfully right? Why bother trying to you know be correct about everything at all? If you're good at something it's different. Right?
But there's a different way of doing things and there's a different way of thinking. Right? Because if you know you're not right anyways why not just believe things that are useful? Take your holy beliefs or whatever and don't move those around. Right?
That's fine they come from your church or whatever but aside from that the way you interact with people why not just believe people can do anything? Right? Why not believe people can do anything? My brother is a therapist and one of the things I was talking to him about is he said that therapists project their beliefs about their clients onto their clients. Right?
They project their belief about their clients onto their clients. Teachers project their beliefs about their students onto their students. And you can't not do it because you can't not communicate because communication is unconscious. You're going to do it automatically. If I don't believe the things I say you see it in my face and something just feels wrong if you don't know what you're looking at you still feel it or you think there's something wrong.
That make sense? You project your beliefs about people onto them. Right? All the time. And if you're arrogant or something like that you project that arrogance and it smells like shit.
You know? If you think you're better than people it just is like you're putting up this thing it's like I'm better than all of you. You know what I mean? Somebody does something and you think it's not correct so you judge it without ever asking am I really right? Who's this rule I made up according you know who made this rule up?
Who made it? You know? There's no rule about something. It's right to do this according to you. Right?
If you're flexible in the way that you think about people the real key is this and this is the model that fits into everything. The real key is this. People are powerful and they could do anything. And so I remember that talking to everyone because I believe in everyone that I talk to all the time. People say how do you believe in me?
You don't know me because I believe in everyone. Right? This gives you a framework a framework to do what's next. And it gives you a framework to operate your business into. It gives you a framework on how you believe about recruiting.
So we are going to be talking about how to think of how to take into account what's possible and what not. We are going to get along with you with this process and talking about how to continue doing those things that
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